Couple gets married on Ethereum blockchain for $587 in transaction fees

Rebecca Rose and Peter Kacherginsky, employees of leading U.S.-based crypto exchange Coinbase, have revealed how they used Ethereum’s blockchain to become lawfully wedded.

On April 3, Rose posted to Twitter to announce the pair had tied the knot on March 14 in both the physical and virtual words.

Most people get married in a place of religious worship, on a beach, or in the mountains. Peter (@_iphelix) and I are NOT most people. We got married on the #blockchain. 1/7 pic.twitter.com/2ExexrlLbZ

— Rebecca Rose (@rgoldilox) April 2, 2021

In addition to a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony, Kacherginsky wrote an Ethereum smart contract named Tabaat that issued tokenized “rings” NFTs in the form of TBT tokens to the couples wallets. Tabaat is the Hebrew word for ring.

Kacherginsky created the 2,218 line-long smart contract on March 10, with the contract costing 0.25 ETH to create — worth roughly $450 at the time. An hour after the contract was created, three more transactions were sent from Tabaat for an additional cost of 0.0048 ETH or $87 — suggesting it costs around $537 to tokenize a marriage contract.

The ceremony itself consisted of two transactions — the transfer of the NFT ‘rings’ from the contract to Rose and Kacherginsky. In total, the ceremony took 4 minutes to be validated by the Ethereum network, and incurred $50 in miner fees.

By contrast, the average physical wedding in the United States costs roughly $25,000.

The NFTs depict an animation of two circles merging to become one, and were illustrated by artist Carl Johan Hasselrot. On Twitter, Rose said:

“The blockchain, unlike physical objects, is forever. It is unstoppable, impossible to censor, and does not require anyone’s permission. Just as love should be. What could possibly be more romantic than that.”

This is not the first blockchain-based marriage, with DLT first being used to tie the knot back October 2014. The wedding saw David Mondrus and Joyce Bayo formalize their matrimony by scanning a QR code during a ceremony held during a private Bitcoin conference at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.